The New Humor in the Progressive Era: Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian by Rick DesRochers (review)

In The New Humor in the Progressive Era: Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian, Rick DesRochers presents vaudeville’s clowns and comics as modernist heroes, artists who self-consciously resist and often reject the oppressive values of the American bourgeoisie. Yet if, as DesRochers successfully illustrates, vaudeville reproduces many of the sensibilities of modernism—from its nonlinear absurdist forms to its assault on the master plots of history—it is not the esoteric modernism of T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. DesRochers locates the power of vaudeville, instead, in both its originality and its populist appeal. Artists such as the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, May Irwin, and Eva Tanguay mined the tension between a radical critique of middle-class values and a savvy courtship of a popular audience. Not unlike jazz musicians—their modernist counterparts—the comics of New Humor relied on dissonance and abstraction to create a similarly electric and seductive connection to the audience. And like jazz, vaudeville became, according to DesRochers, similarly famous and forbidden.

In a sharp, perceptive opening chapter, DesRochers teases out the complicated motivations that inspired Progressive Era writers and activists—Benjamin Parke De Witt, Jane Adams, Walter Lippmann, among others—to defend the immigrant poor while at the same time disparaging their taste, their behavior, their language, their food, and even their child-rearing. Opposed to high-brow reform efforts that have since given us everything from “The Pledge of Allegiance” to Shakespeare in the Park were the occasionally crass, shocking, vulgar, and/or racist gags of the vaudeville stage, where female and immigrant voices erupted in a chaotic display of self-determination. As reformers attempted to indoctrinate immigrants into the emerging values of the middle class by urging them to become educated and thereby more “American,” the skits and gags of vaudevillians like the Marx Brothers celebrated the disruption of this reform agenda. DesRochers highlights the various school acts that began on the vaudeville stage, as well as the way comic performers unsettled expectations of decorum, particularly for women. According to DesRochers, the vaudevillians’ manipulation of gender and ethnic stereotypes in these performances becomes a corrective to the homogenizing designs of Progressive era politics. Situated at the intersection of immigrant experience and popular culture, New Humor attracts as much as (and often because) it offends. DesRochers writes, “The new humor posed a special problem for Progressive-era reformers and critics in that it could not be managed because of its troubling nature—not being able to discern if one was being laughed at, or with” (12).

What emerges from DesRochers’s study is a rendering of the culture wars that is surprising and yet profoundly familiar. DesRochers explores the often hysterical and over-determined worries of progressives who saw vaudeville as a threat to the melting pot, which appears in DesRochers’s reading to be something closer to a cauldron. The scope and variety of primary sources that DesRochers uses is impressive, from theater reviews of the Marx Brothers’ Fun in Hi Skule (1910), to essays by cultural critics like Randolph Bourne and H. L. Mencken, to the letters, memories, and memoirs of vaudevillians both famous and long forgotten. As DesRochers resurrects these voices, we can hear current debates about popular and populist entertainment: Spike Lee’s description, for example, of Tyler Perry’s films as mere “coonery and buffoonery,” or the concerns that sentimental television aimed at women is “dumb,” or that rap music threatens everything from public safety to political stability. As we see in DesRochers’s portrait of vaudeville, these fears are not new; more troubling, perhaps, is the possibility that these cultural anxieties may be inspired by the same privileged and “pure” conception of American identity that sought to contain New Humor a hundred years ago.

DesRochers clearly draws the battle-lines between the cultural elite and the immigrant, working-class men and women of vaudeville. And if there is any...